The Heart of England -- The weaver
Carey who became a Peer, and the weaver who was father of William Carey
-- Early training in Paulerspury -- Impressions made by him on his sister
-- On his companions and the villagers -- His experience as son of the
parish clerk -- Apprenticed to a shoemaker of Hackleton -- Poverty -- Famous
shoemakers from Annianus and Crispin to Hans Sachs and Whittier -- From
Pharisaism to Christ -- The last shall be first -- The dissenting preacher
in the parish clerk's home -- He studies Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Dutch
and French -- The cobbler's shed is Carey's College.

William Carey, the first of her own
children of the Reformation whom England sent forth as a missionary to
India, where he became the most extensive translator of the Bible and civiliser,
was the son of a weaver, and was himself a village shoemaker till he was
twenty-eight years of age. He was born on the 17th August 1761, in the
very midland of England, in the heart of the district which had produced
Shakspere, had fostered Wyclif and Hooker, had bred Fox and Bunyan, and
had for a time been the scene of the lesser lights of John Mason and Doddridge,
of John Newton and Thomas Scott. William Cowper, the poet of missions,
made the land his chosen home, writing "Hope" and "The Task" in Olney,
while the shoemaker was studying theology under Sutcliff on the opposite
side of the market-place. Thomas Clarkson, born a year before Carey, was
beginning his assaults on the slave-trade by translating into English his
Latin essay on the day-star of African liberty when the shoemaker, whom
no university knew, was writing his Enquiry into the Obligations of
Christians to use means for the Conversion of the Heathens.

William Carey bore a name which had slowly
fallen into forgetfulness after services to the Stewarts, with whose cause
it had been identified. Professor Stephens, of Copenhagen, traces it to
the Scando-Anglian Car, Caer, or Care, which became a place-name as Car-ey.
Among scores of neighbours called William, William of Car-ey would soon
sink into Carey, and this would again become the family name. In Denmark
the name Caròe is common. The oldest English instance is the Cariet
who coined money in London for Æthelred II. in 1016. Certainly the
name, through its forms of Crew, Carew, Carey, and Cary, still prevails
on the Irish coast--from which depression of trade drove the family first
to Yorkshire, then to the Northamptonshire village of Yelvertoft, and finally
to Paulerspury, farther south--as well as over the whole Danegelt from
Lincolnshire to Devonshire. If thus there was Norse blood in William Carey
it came out in his persistent missionary daring, and it is pleasant even
to speculate on the possibility of such an origin in one who was all his
Indian life indebted to Denmark for the protection which alone made his
career possible.

The Careys who became famous in English
history sprang from Devon. For two and a half centuries, from the second
Richard to the second Charles, they gave statesmen and soldiers, scholars
and bishops, to the service of their country. Henry Carey, first cousin
of Queen Elizabeth, was the common ancestor of two ennobled houses long
since extinct--the Earls of Dover and the Earls of Monmouth. A third peerage
won by the Careys has been made historic by the patriotic counsels and
self-sacrificing fate of Viscount Falkland, whose representative was Governor
of Bombay for a time. Two of the heroic Falkland's descendants, aged ladies,
addressed a pathetic letter to Parliament about the time that the great
missionary died, praying that they might not be doomed to starvation by
being deprived of a crown pension of £80 a year. The older branch
of the Careys also had fallen on evil times, and it became extinct while
the future missionary was yet four years old. The seventh lord was a weaver
when he succeeded to the title, and he died childless. The eighth was a
Dutchman who had to be naturalised, and he was the last. The Careys fell
lower still. One of them bore to the brilliant and reckless Marquis of
Halifax, Henry Carey, who wrote one of the few English ballads that live.
Another, the poet's granddaughter, was the mother of Edmund Kean, and he
at first was known by her name on the stage.

At that time when the weaver became the
lord the grandfather of the missionary was parish clerk and first schoolmaster
of the village of Paulerspury, eleven miles south of Northampton, and near
the ancient posting town of Towcester, on the old Roman road from London
to Chester. The free school was at the east or "church end" of the village,
which, after crossing the old Watling Street, straggles for a mile over
a sluggish burn to the "Pury end. " One son, Thomas, had enlisted and was
in Canada. Edmund Carey, the second, set up the loom on which he wove the
woollen cloth known as "tammy," in a two-storied cottage. There his eldest
child, William, was born, and lived for six years till his father was appointed
schoolmaster, when the family removed to the free schoolhouse. The cottage
was demolished in 1854 by one Richard Linnell, who placed on the still
meaner structure now occupying the site the memorial slab that guides many
visitors to the spot. The schoolhouse, in which William Carey spent the
eight most important years of his childhood till he was fourteen, and the
school made way for the present pretty buildings.

The village surroundings and the country
scenery coloured the whole of the boy's after life, and did much to make
him the first agricultural improver and naturalist of Bengal, which he
became. The lordship of Pirie, as it was called by Gitda, its Saxon owner,
was given by the Conqueror, with much else, to his natural son, William
Peverel, as we see from the Domesday survey. His descendants passed it
on to Robert de Paveli, whence its present name, but in Carey's time it
was held by the second Earl Bathurst, who was Lord Chancellor. Up to the
very schoolhouse came the royal forest of Whittlebury, its walks leading
north to the woods of Salcey, of Yardley Chase and Rockingham, from the
beeches which give Buckingham its name. Carey must have often sat under
the Queen's Oak, still venerable in its riven form, where Edward IV. ,
when hunting, first saw Elizabeth, unhappy mother of the two princes murdered
in the Tower.

The silent robbery of the people's rights
called "inclosures" has done much, before and since Carey's time, to sweep
away or shut up the woodlands. The country may be less beautiful, while
the population has grown so that Paulerspury has now nearly double the
eight hundred inhabitants of a century ago. But its oolitic hills, gently
swelling to above 700 feet, and the valleys of the many rivers which flow
from this central watershed, west and east, are covered with fat vegetation
almost equally divided between grass and corn, with green crops. The many
large estates are rich in gardens and orchards. The farmers, chiefly on
small holdings, are famous for their shorthorns and Leicester sheep. Except
for the rapidly-developing production of iron from the Lias, begun by the
Romans, there is but one manufacture--that of shoes. It is now centred
by modern machinery and labour arrangements in Northampton itself, which
has 24,000 shoemakers, and in the other towns, but a century ago the craft
was common to every hamlet. For botany and agriculture, however, Northamptonshire
was the finest county in England, and young Carey had trodden many a mile
of it, as boy and man, before he left home for ever for Bengal.

Two unfinished autobiographical sketches,
written from India at the request of Fuller and of Ryland, and letters
of his youngest sister Mary, his favourite "Polly" who survived him, have
preserved for us in still vivid characters the details of the early training
of William Carey. He was the eldest of five children. He was the special
care of their grandmother, a woman of a delicate nature and devout habits,
who closed her sad widowhood in the weaver-son's cottage. Encompassed by
such a living influence the grandson spent his first six years. Already
the child unconsciously showed the eager thirst for knowledge, and perseverance
in attaining his object, which made him chiefly what he became. His mother
would often be awoke in the night by the pleasant lisping of a voice "casting
accompts [=accounts]; so intent was he from childhood in the pursuit of
knowledge. Whatever he began he finished; difficulties never seemed to
discourage his mind. " On removal to the ancestral schoolhouse the boy
had a room to himself. His sister describes it as full of insects stuck
in every corner that he might observe their progress.

His many birds he entrusted to her care
when he was from home. In this picture we see the exact foreshadowing of
the man. "Though I often used to kill his birds by kindness, yet when he
saw my grief for it he always indulged me with the pleasure of serving
them again; and often took me over the dirtiest roads to get at a plant
or an insect. He never walked out, I think, when quite a boy, without observation
on the hedges as he passed; and when he took up a plant of any kind he
always observed it with care. Though I was but a child I well remember
his pursuits. He always seemed in earnest in his recreations as well as
in school. He was generally one of the most active in all the amusements
and recreations that boys in general pursue. He was always beloved by the
boys about his own age. " To climb a certain tree was the object of their
ambition; he fell often in the attempt, but did not rest till he had succeeded.
His Uncle Peter was a gardener in the same village, and gave him his first
lessons in botany and horticulture. He soon became responsible for his
father's official garden, till it was the best kept in the neighbourhood.
Wherever after that he lived, as boy or man, poor or in comfort, William
Carey made and perfected his garden, and always for others, until he created
at Serampore the botanical park which for more than half a century was
unique in Southern Asia.

We have in a letter from the Manse, Paulerspury,
a tradition of the impression made on the dull rustics by the dawning genius
of the youth whom they but dimly comprehended. He went amongst them under
the nickname of Columbus, and they would say, "Well, if you won't play,
preach us a sermon," which he would do. Mounting on an old dwarf witch-elm
about seven feet high, where several could sit, he would hold forth. This
seems to have been a resort of his for reading, his favourite occupation.
The same authority tells how, when suffering toothache, he allowed his
companions to drag the tooth from his head with a violent jerk, by tying
around it a string attached to a wheel used to grind malt, to which they
gave a sharp turn.

The boy's own peculiar room was a little
library as well as museum of natural history. He possessed a few books,
which indeed were many for those days, but he borrowed more from the whole
country-side. Recalling the eight years of his intellectual apprenticeship
till he was fourteen, from the serene height of his missionary standard,
he wrote long after:-- "I chose to read books of science, history, voyages,
etc. , more than any others. Novels and plays always disgusted me, and
I avoided them as much as I did books of religion, and perhaps from the
same motive. I was better pleased with romances, and this circumstance
made me read the Pilgrim's Progress with eagerness, though to no
purpose. " The new era, of which he was to be the aggressive spiritual
representative from Christendom, had not dawned. Walter Scott was ten years
his junior. Captain Cook had not discovered the Sandwich Islands, and was
only returning from the second of his three voyages while Carey was still
at school. The church services and the watchfulness of his father supplied
the directly moral training which his grandmother had begun.

The Paulerspury living of St. James is
a valuable rectory in the gift of New College, Oxford. Originally built
in Early English, and rebuilt in 1844, the church must have presented a
still morenvenerable appearance a century ago than it does now, with its
noble tower in the Perpendicular, and chancel in the Decorated style, dominating
all the county. Then, as still, effigies of a Paveli and his wife, and
of Sir Arthur Throckmorton and his wife recumbent head to head, covered
a large altar-tomb in the chancel, and with the Bathurst and other monuments
called forth first the fear and then the pride of the parish clerk's eldest
son. In those days the clerk had just below the pulpit the desk from which
his sonorous "Amen" sounded forth, while his family occupied a low gallery
rising from the same level up behind the pulpit. There the boys of the
free school also could be under the master's eye, and with instruments
of music like those of King David, but now banished from even village churches,
would accompany him in the doggerel strains of Sternhold and Hopkins, immortalised
by Cowper.

To the far right the boys could see and
long for the ropes under the tower, in which the bell-ringers of his day,
as of Bunyan's not long before, delighted. The preaching of the time did
nothing more for young Carey than for the rest of England and Scotland,
whom the parish church had not driven into dissent or secession. But he
could not help knowing the Prayer-Book, and especially its psalms and lessons,
and he was duly confirmed. The family training, too, was exceptionally
scriptural, though not evangelical. "I had many stirrings of mind occasioned
by being often obliged to read books of a religious character; and, having
been accustomed from my infancy to read the Scriptures, I had a considerable
acquaintance therewith, especially with the historical parts. " The first
result was to make him despise dissenters. But, undoubtedly, this eldest
son of the schoolmaster and the clerk of the parish had at fourteen received
an education from parents, nature, and books which, with his habits of
observation, love of reading, and perseverance, made him better instructed
than most boys of fourteen--far above the peasant class to which he belonged.

Buried in this obscure village in the
dullest period of the dullest of all centuries, the boy had no better prospect
before him than that of a weaver or labourer, or possibly a schoolmaster
like one of his uncles in the neighbouring town of Towcester. When twelve
years of age, with his uncle there, he might have formed one of the crowd
which listened to John Wesley, who, in 1773 and then aged seventy, visited
the prosperous posting town. Paulerspury could indeed boast of one son,
Edward Bernard, D.D. , who, two centuries before, had made for himself
a name in Oxford, where he was Savilian Professor of Astronomy. But Carey
was not a Scotsman, and therefore the university was not for such as he.
Like his school-fellows, he seemed born to the English labourer's fate
of five shillings a week, and the poorhouse in sickness and old age. From
this, in the first instance, he was saved by a disease which affected his
face and hands most painfully whenever he was long exposed to the sun.
For seven years he had failed to find relief. His attempt at work in the
field were for two years followed by distressing agony at night.

He was now sixteen, and his father sought
out a good man who would receive him as apprentice to the shoemaking trade.
The man was not difficult to find, in the hamlet of Hackleton, nine miles
off, in the person of one Clarke Nichols. The lad afterwards described
him as "a strict churchman and, what I thought, a very moral man. It is
true he sometimes drank rather too freely, and generally employed me in
carrying out goods on the Lord's Day morning; but he was an inveterate
enemy to lying, a vice to which I was awfully addicted. " The senior apprentice
was a dissenter, and the master and his boys gave much of the talk over
their work to disputes upon religious subjects. Carey "had always looked
upon dissenters with contempt. I had, moreover, a share of pride sufficient
for a thousand times my knowledge; I therefore always scorned to have the
worst in an argument, and the last word was assuredly mine. I also made
up in positive assertion what was wanting in argument, and generally came
off with triumph. But I was often convinced afterwards that although I
had the last word my antagonist had the better of the argument, and on
that account felt a growing uneasiness and stings of conscience gradually
increasing. " The dissenting apprentice was soon to be the first to lead
him to Christ.

William Carey was a shoemaker during
the twelve years of his life from sixteen to twenty-eight, till he went
to Leicester. Poverty, which the grace of God used to make him a preacher
also from his eighteenth year, compelled him to work with his hands in
leather all the week, and to tramp many a weary mile to Northampton and
Kettering carrying the product of his labour. At one time, when minister
of Moulton, he kept a school by day, made or cobbled shoes by night, and
preached on Sunday. So Paul had made tents of his native Cilician goatskin
in the days when infant Christianity was chased from city to city, and
the cross was a reproach only less bitter, however, than evangelical dissent
in Christian England in the eighteenth century. The providence which made
and kept young Carey so long a shoemaker, put him in the very position
in which he could most fruitfully receive and nurse the sacred fire that
made him the most learned scholar and Bible translator of his day in the
East.

The same providence thus linked him to
the earliest Latin missionaries of Alexandria, of Asia Minor, and of Gaul,
who were shoemakers, and to a succession of scholars and divines, poets
and critics, reformers and philanthropists, who have used the shoemaker's
life to become illustrious. St. Mark chose for his successor, as first
bishop of Alexandria, that Annianus whom he had been the means of converting
to Christ when he found him at the cobbler's stall. The Talmud commemorates
the courage and the wisdom of "Rabbi Jochanan, the shoemaker," whose learning
soon after found a parallel in Carey's. Like Annianus, "a poor shoemaker
named Alexander, despised in the world but great in the sight of God, who
did honour to so exalted a station in the Church," became famous as Bishop
of Comana in Cappadocia, as saint, preacher, and missionary-martyr. Soon
after there perished in the persecutions of Diocletian, at Soissons, the
two missionary brothers whose name of Crispin has ever since been gloried
in by the trade, which they chose at once as a means of livelihood and
of helping their poor converts.

The Hackleton apprentice was still a
child when the great Goethe was again adding to the then artificial literature
of his country his own true predecessor, Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of Nürnberg,
the friend of Luther, the meistersinger of the Reformation. And it was
another German shoemaker, Boehme, whose exalted theosophy as expounded
by William Law became one link in the chain that drew Carey to Christ,
as it influenced Wesley and Whitefield, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge. George
Fox was only nineteen when, after eight years' service with a shoemaker
in Drayton, Leicestershire, not far from Carey's county, he heard the voice
from heaven which sent him forth in 1643 to preach righteousness, temperance,
and judgment to come, till Cromwell sought converse with him, and the Friends
became a power among men.

Carlyle has, in characteristic style,
seized on the true meaning that was in the man when he made to himself
a suit of leather and became the modern hero of Sartor Resartus. The words
fit William Carey's case even better than that of George Fox:-- "Sitting
in his stall, working on tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin,
swine-bristles, and a nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had nevertheless
a Living Spirit belonging to him; also an antique Inspired Volume, through
which, as through a window, it could look upwards and discern its celestial
Home. "That shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place than any Vatican
or Loretto-shrine.... Stitch away, every prick of that little instrument
is pricking into the heart of slavery." Thirty-six years after Fox had
begun to wear his leathern doublet he directed all Friends everywhere that
had Indians or blacks to preach the Gospel to them.

But it would be too long to tell the
list of workers in what has been called the gentle craft, whom the cobbler's
stall, with its peculiar opportunities for rhythmic meditation, hard thinking,
and oft harder debating, has prepared for the honours of literature and
scholarship, of philanthropy and reform. To mention only Carey's contemporaries,
the career of these men ran parallel at home with his abroad-- Thomas Shillitoe,
who stood before magistrates, bishops, and such sovereigns as George III.
and IV. and the Czar Alexander I. in the interests of social reform; and
John Pounds, the picture of whom as the founder of ragged schools led Thomas
Guthrie, when he stumbled on it in an inn in Anstruther, to do the same
Christlike work in Scotland. Coleridge, who when at Christ's Hospital was
ambitious to be a shoemaker's apprentice, was right when he declared that
shoemakers had given to the world a larger number of eminent men than any
other handicraft. Whittier's own early experience in Massachusetts fitted
him to be the poet-laureate of the craft which for some years he adorned.
His Songs of Labour, published in 1850, contain the best English
lines on shoemakers since Shakspere put into the mouth of King Henry V.
the address on the eve of Agincourt, which begins: "This day is called
the feast of Crispin." But Whittier, Quaker, philanthropist, and countryman
of Judson though he was, might have found a place for Carey when he sang
so well of others:--

The confessions of Carey, made in the spiritual
humility and self-examination of his later life, form a parallel to the
Grace
Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, the little classic of John Bunyan
second only to his Pilgrim's Progress. The young Pharisee, who entered
Hackleton with such hate in his heart to dissenters that he would have
destroyed their meeting-place, who practised "lying, swearing, and other
sins," gradually yielded so far to his brother apprentice's importunity
as to leave these off, to try to pray sometimes when alone, to attend church
three times a day, and to visit the dissenting prayer-meeting. Like the
zealot who thought to do God service by keeping the whole law, Carey lived
thus for a time, "not doubting but this would produce ease of mind and
make me acceptable to God." What revealed him to himself was an incident
which he tells in language recalling at once Augustine and one of the subtlest
sketches of George Eliot, in which the latter uses her half-knowledge of
evangelical faith to stab the very truth that delivered Paul and Augustine,
Bunyan and Carey, from the antinomianism of the Pharisee:--

"A circumstance which I always
reflect on with a mixture of horror and gratitude occurred about this time,
which, though greatly to my dishonour, I must relate. It being customary
in that part of the country for apprentices to collect Christmas boxes
[donations] from the tradesmen with whom their masters have dealings, I
was permitted to collect these little sums. When I applied to an ironmonger,
he gave me the choice of a shilling or a sixpence; I of course chose the
shilling, and putting it in my pocket, went away. When I had got a few
shillings my next care was to purchase some little articles for myself,
I have forgotten what. But then, to my sorrow, I found that my shilling
was a brass one. I paid for the things which I bought by using a shilling
of my master's. I now found that I had exceeded my stock by a few pence.
I expected severe reproaches from my master, and therefore came to the
resolution to declare strenuously that the bad money was his. I well remember
the struggles of mind which I had on this occasion, and that I made this
deliberate sin a matter of prayer to God as I passed over the fields towards
home! I there promised that, if God would but get me clearly over this,
or, in other words, help me through with the theft, I would certainly for
the future leave off all evil practices; but this theft and consequent
lying appeared to me so necessary, that they could not be dispensed with.

"A gracious God did not get me
safe through. My master sent the other apprentice to investigate the matter.
The ironmonger acknowledged the giving me the shilling, and I was therefore
exposed to shame, reproach, and inward remorse, which preyed upon my mind
for a considerable time. I at this time sought the Lord, perhaps much more
earnestly than ever, but with shame and fear. I was quite ashamed to go
out, and never, till I was assured that my conduct was not spread over
the town, did I attend a place of worship.

"I trust that, under these circumstances,
I was led to see much more of myself than I had ever done before, and to
seek for mercy with greater earnestness. I attended prayer-meetings only,
however, till February 10, 1779, which being appointed a day of fasting
and prayer, I attended worship on that day. Mr. Chater [congregationalist]
of Olney preached, but from what text I have forgotten. He insisted much
on following Christ entirely, and enforced his exhortation with that passage,
'Let us therefore go out unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach.'--Heb.
xiii. 13. I think I had a desire to follow Christ; but one idea occurred
to my mind on hearing those words which broke me off from the Church of
England. The idea was certainly very crude, but useful in bringing me from
attending a lifeless, carnal ministry to one more evangelical. I concluded
that the Church of England, as established by law, was the camp in which
all were protected from the scandal of the cross, and that I ought to bear
the reproach of Christ among the dissenters; and accordingly I always afterwards
attended divine worship among them. "

At eighteen Carey was thus emptied of self
and there was room for Christ. In a neighbouring village he consorted much
for a time with some followers of William Law, who had not long before
passed away in a village in the neighbourhood, and select passages from
whose writings the Moravian minister, Francis Okely, of Northampton, had
versified. These completed the negative process. "I felt ruined and helpless."
Then to his spiritual eyes, purged of self, there appeared the Crucified
One; and to his spiritual intelligence there was given the Word of God.
The change was that wrought on Paul by a Living Person. It converted the
hypocritical Pharisee into the evangelical preacher; it turned the vicious
peasant into the most self-denying saint; it sent the village shoemaker
far off to the Hindoos.

But the process was slow; it had been
so even in Paul's case. Carey found encouragement in intercourse with some
old Christians in Hackleton, and he united with a few of them, including
his fellow-apprentice, in forming a congregational church. The state of
the parish may be imagined from its recent history. Hackleton is part of
Piddington, and the squire had long appropriated the living of £300
a year, the parsonage, the glebe, and all tithes, sending his house minister
"at times" to do duty. A Certificate from Northamptonshire, against
the pluralities and other such scandals, published in 1641, declared that
not a child or servant in Hackleton or Piddington could say the Lord's
Prayer. Carey sought the preaching of Doddridge's successor at Northampton,
of a Baptist minister at Road, and of Scott the commentator, then at Ravenstone.
He had found peace, but was theologically "inquisitive and unsatisfied."
Fortunately, like Luther, he "was obliged to draw all from the Bible alone."

When, at twenty years of age, Carey was
slowly piecing together "the doctrines in the Word of God" into something
like a system which would at once satisfy his own spiritual and intellectual
needs, and help him to preach to others, a little volume was published,
of which he wrote:-- "I do not remember ever to have read any book with
such raptures." It was Help to Zion's Travellers; being an attempt to
remove various Stumbling-Blocks out of the Way, relating to Doctrinal,
Experimental, and Practical Religion, by Robert Hall. The writer was
the father of the greater Robert Hall, a venerable man, who, in his village
church of Arnsby, near Leicester, had already taught Carey how to preach.
The book is described as an "attempt to relieve discouraged Christians"
in a day of gloominess and perplexity, that they might devote themselves
to Christ through life as well as be found in Him in death. Carey made
a careful synopsis of it in an exquisitely neat hand on the margin of each
page. The worm-eaten copy, which he treasured even in India, is now deposited
in Bristol College.

A Calvinist of the broad missionary type
of Paul, Carey somewhat suddenly, according to his own account, became
a Baptist. "I do not recollect having read anything on the subject till
I applied to Mr. Ryland, senior, to baptise me. He lent me a pamphlet,
and turned me over to his son," who thus told the story when the Baptist
Missionary Society held its first public meeting in London:-- "October
5th, 1783: I baptised in the river Nen, a little beyond Dr. Doddridge's
meeting-house at Northampton, a poor journeyman shoemaker, little thinking
that before nine years had elapsed, he would prove the first instrument
of forming a society for sending missionaries from England to preach the
gospel to the heathen. Such, however, as the event has proved, was the
purpose of the Most High, who selected for this work not the son of one
of our most learned ministers, nor of one of the most opulent of our dissenting
gentlemen, but the son of a parish clerk. "

The spot may still be visited at the
foot of the hill, where the Nen fed the moat of the old castle, in which
many a Parliament sat from the days of King John. The text of that morning's
sermon happened to be the Lord's saying, "Many first shall be last, and
the last first," which asserts His absolute sovereignty in choosing and
in rewarding His missionaries, and introduces the parable of the labourers
in the vineyard. As Carey wrote in the fulness of his fame, that the evangelical
doctrines continued to be the choice of his heart, so he never wavered
in his preference for the Baptist division of the Christian host. But from
the first he enjoyed the friendship of Scott and Newton, and of his neighbour
Mr. Robinson of St. Mary's, Leicester, and we shall see him in India the
centre of the Episcopal and Presbyterian chaplains and missionaries from
Martyn Wilson to Lacroix and Duff. His controversial spirit died with the
youthful conceit and self-righteousness of which it is so often the birth.
When at eighteen he learned to know himself, he became forever humble.
A zeal like that of his new-found Master took its place, and all the energy
of his nature, every moment of his time, was directed to setting Him forth.

In his monthly visits to the father-house
at Paulerspury the new man in him could not be hid. His sister gives us
a vivid sketch of the lad, whose going over to the dissenters was resented
by the formal and stern clerk, and whose evangelicalism was a reproach
to the others.

"At this time he was increasingly
thoughtful, and very was jealous for the Lord of Hosts. Like Gideon, he
seemed for throwing down all the altars of Baal in one night. When he came
home we used to wonder at the change. We knew that before he was rather
inclined to persecute the faith he now seemed to wish to propagate. At
first, perhaps, his zeal exceeded the bounds of prudence; but he felt the
importance of things we were strangers to, and his natural disposition
was to pursue earnestly what he undertook, so that it was not to be wondered
at, though we wondered at the change. He stood alone in his father's house
for some years. After a time he asked permission to have family prayer
when he came home to see us, a favour which he very readily had granted.
Often have I felt my pride rise while he was engaged in prayer, at the
mention of those words in Isaiah, 'that all our righteousness was like
filthy rags.' I did not think he thought his so, but looked on me and the
family as filthy, not himself and his party. Oh, what pride is in the human
heart! Nothing but my love to my brother would have kept me from showing
my resentment."

"A few of the friends of religion wished
our brother to exercise his gifts by speaking to a few friends in a house
licensed at Pury; which he did with great acceptance. The next morning
a neighbour of ours, a very pious woman, came in to congratulate my mother
on the occasion, and to speak of the Lord's goodness in calling her son,
and my brother, two such near neighbours, to the same noble calling. My
mother replied, 'What, do you think he will be a preacher?' 'Yes,' she
replied, 'and a great one, I think, if spared.' From that time till he
was settled at Moulton he regularly preached once a month at Pury with
much acceptance. He was at that time in his twentieth year, and married.
Our parents were always friendly to religion; yet, on some accounts, we
should rather have wished him to go from home than come home to preach.
I do not think I ever heard him, though my younger brother and my sister,
I think, generally did. Our father much wished to hear his son, if he could
do it unseen by him or any one. It was not long before an opportunity offered,
and he embraced it. Though he was a man that never discovered any partiality
for the abilities of his children, but rather sometimes went too far on
the other hand, that often tended a little to discourage them, yet we were
convinced that he approved of what he heard, and was highly gratified by
it. "

In Hackleton itself his expositions of Scripture
were so valued that the people, he writes, "being ignorant, sometimes applauded
to my great injury." When in poverty, so deep that he fasted all that day
because he had not a penny to buy a dinner, he attended a meeting of the
Association of Baptist Churches at Olney, not far off. There he first met
with his lifelong colleague, the future secretary of the mission, Andrew
Fuller, the young minister of Soham, who preached on being men in understanding,
and there it was arranged that he should preach regularly to a small congregation
at Earls Barton, six miles from Hackleton. His new-born humility made him
unable to refuse the duty, which he discharged for more than three years
while filling his cobbler's stall at Hackleton all the week, and frequently
preaching elsewhere also. The secret of his power which drew the Northamptonshire
peasants and craftsmen to the feet of their fellow was this, that he studied
the portion of Scripture, which he read every morning at his private devotions,
in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

This was Carey's "college." On the death
of his first master, when he was eighteen, he had transferred his apprenticeship
to a Mr. T. Old. Hackleton stands on the high road from Bedford and Olney
to Northampton, and Thomas Scott was in the habit of resting at Mr. Old's
on his not infrequent walks from Olney, where he had succeeded John Newton.
There he had no more attentive listener or intelligent talker than the
new journeyman, who had been more influenced by his preaching at Ravenstone
than by that of any other man. Forty years after, just before Scott's death,
Dr. Ryland gave him this message from Carey:-- "If there be anything of
the work of God in my soul, I owe much of it to his preaching when I first
set out in the ways of the Lord;" to which this reply was sent: "I am surprised
as well as gratified at your message from Dr. Carey. He heard me preach
only a few times, and that as far as I know in my rather irregular excursions;
though I often conversed and prayed in his presence, and endeavoured to
answer his sensible and pertinent inquiries when at Hackleton. But to have
suggested even a single useful hint to such a mind as his must be considered
as a high privilege and matter of gratitude." Scott had previously written
this more detailed account of his intercourse with the preaching shoemaker,
whom he first saw when he called on Mr. Old to tell him of the welfare
of his mother:

"When I went into the cottage
I was soon recognised, and Mr. Old came in, with a sensible-looking lad
in his working-dress. I at first rather wondered to see him enter, as he
seemed young, being, I believe, little of his age. We, however, entered
into very interesting conversation, especially respecting my parishioner,
their relative, and the excellent state of her mind, and the wonder of
divine grace in the conversion of one who had been so very many years considered
as a self-righteous Pharisee. I believe I endeavoured to show that the
term was often improperly applied to conscientious but ignorant inquirers,
who are far from self-satisfied, and who, when the Gospel is set before
them, find the thing which they had long been groping after. However that
may be, I observed the lad who entered with Mr. Old riveted in attention
with every mark and symptom of intelligence and feeling; saying little,
but modestly asking now and then an appropriate question. I took occasion,
before I went forward, to inquire after him, and found that, young as he
was, he was a member of the church at Hackleton, and looked upon as a very
consistent and promising character. I lived at Olney till the end of 1785;
and in the course of that time I called perhaps two or three times each
year at Mr. Old's, and was each time more and more struck with the youth's
conduct, though I said little; but, before I left Olney, Mr. Carey was
out of his engagement with Mr. Old. I found also that he was sent out as
a probationary preacher, and preached at Moulton; and I said to all to
whom I had access, that he would, if I could judge, prove no ordinary man.

"Yet, though I often met both old Mr.
Ryland, the present Dr. Ryland, Mr. Hall, Mr. Fuller, and knew almost every
step taken in forming your Missionary Society, and though I sometimes preached
very near Moulton, it so happened that I do not recollect having met with
him any more, till he came to my house in London with Mr. Thomas, to desire
me to use what little influence I had with Charles Grant, Esq., to procure
them licence to go in the Company's ships as missionaries to the British
settlements in India, perhaps in 1792. My little influence was of no avail.
What I said of Mr. Carey so far satisfied Mr. Grant that he said, if Mr.
Carey was going alone, or with one equally to be depended on along with
him, he would not oppose him; but his strong disapprobation of Mr. T.,
on what ground I knew not, induced his negative. I believe Mr. Old died
soon after I left Olney, if not just before; and his shop, which was a
little building apart from the house, was suffered to go to decay. While
in this state I several times passed it, and said to my sons and others
with me, that is Mr. Carey's college."

This cobbler's shed which was Carey's
college has been since restored, but two of the original walls still stand,
forming the corner in which he sat, opposite the window that looks out
into the garden he carefully kept. Here, when his second master died, Carey
succeeded to the business, charging himself with the care of the widow,
and marrying the widow's sister, Dorothy or Dolly Placket. He was only
twenty when he took upon himself such burdens, in the neighbouring church
of Piddington, a village to which he afterwards moved his shop. Never had
minister, missionary, or scholar a less sympathetic mate, due largely to
that latent mental disease which in India carried her off; but for more
than twenty years the husband showed her loving reverence. As we stand
in the Hackleton shed, over which Carey placed the rude signboard prepared
by his own hands, and now in the library of Regent's Park College, "Second
Hand Shoes Bought and Sold,"/1/
we can realise the low estate to which Carey fell, even below his father's
loom and schoolhouse, and from which he was called to become the apostle
of North India as Schwartz was of the South.

How was this shed his college? We have
seen that he brought with him from his native village an amount of information,
habits of observation, and a knowledge of books unusual in rustics of that
day, and even of the present time. At twelve he made his first acquaintance
with a language other than his own, when he mastered the short grammar
in Dyche's Latine Vocabulary, and committed nearly the whole book to memory.
When urging him to take the preaching at Barton, Mr. Sutcliff of Olney
gave him Ruddiman's Latin Grammar. The one alleviation of his lot under
the coarse but upright Nichols was found in his master's small library.
There he began to study Greek. In a New Testament commentary he found Greek
words, which he carefully transcribed and kept until he should next visit
home, where a youth whom dissipation had reduced from college to weaving
explained both the words and their terminations to him.

All that he wanted was such beginnings.
Hebrew he seems to have learned by the aid of the neighbouring ministers;
borrowing books from them, and questioning them "pertinently," as he did
Scott./2/ At the end of Hopkins's
Three
Sermons on the Effects of Sin on the Universe, preached in 1759, he
had made this entry on 9th August 1787-- "Gulielm. Careius perlegit."
He starved himself to purchase a few books at the sale which attended Dr.
Ryland's removal from Northampton to Bristol. In an old woman's cottage
he found a Dutch quarto, and from that he so taught himself the language
that in 1789 he translated for Ryland a discourse on the Gospel Offer sent
to him by the evangelical Dr. Erskine of Edinburgh. The manuscript is in
an extremely small character, unlike what might have been expected from
one who had wrought with his hands for eight years. French he acquired,
sufficiently for literary purposes, in three weeks from the French version
of Ditton on the Resurrection, which he purchased for a few coppers.

He had the linguistic gift which soon
after made the young carpenter Mezzofanti of Bologna famous and a cardinal.
But the gift would have been buried in the grave of his penury and his
circumstances had his trade been almost any other, and had he not been
impelled by the most powerful of all motives. He never sat on his stall
without his book before him, nor did he painfully toil with his wallet
of new-made shoes to the neighbouring towns or return with leather without
conning over his lately-acquired knowledge, and making it forever, in orderly
array, his own. He so taught his evening school and his Sunday congregations
that the teaching to him, like writing to others, stereotyped or lighted
up the truths. Indeed, the school and the cobbling often went on together--a
fact commemorated in the addition to the Hackleton signboard of the Piddington
nail on which he used to fix his thread while teaching the children.

But that which sanctified and directed
the whole throughout a working life of more than half a century, was the
missionary idea and the missionary consecration. With a caution not often
shown at that time by bishops in laying hands on those whom they had passed
for deacon's orders, the little church at Olney thus dealt with the Father
of Modern Missions before they would recognise his call and send him out
"to preach the gospel wherever God in His providence might call him:"

"June 17, 1785.--A request from
William Carey of Moulton, in Northamptonshire, was taken into consideration.
He has been and still is in connection with a society of people at Hackleton.
He is occasionally engaged with acceptance in various places in speaking
the Word. He bears a very good moral character. He is desirous of being
sent out from some reputable church of Christ into the work of the ministry.
The principal Question was--'In what manner shall we receive him? by a
letter from the people of Hackleton, or on a profession of faith, etc.?'
The final resolution of it was left to another church Meeting.

"July 14.--Ch. Meeting. W. Carey appeared
before the Church, and having given a satisfactory account of the work
of God upon his soul, he was admitted a member. He had been formerly baptised
by the Rev. Mr. Ryland, jun., of Northampton. He was invited by the Church
to preach in public once next Lord's Day.

"July 17.--Ch. Meeting, Lord's Day Evening.
W. Carey, in consequence of a request from the Church, preached this Evening.
After which it was resolved that he should be allowed to go on preaching
at those places where he has been for some time employed, and that he should
engage again on suitable occasions for some time before us, in order that
farther trial may be made of ministerial gifts.

"June 16, 1786.--C.M. The case of Bror.
Carey was considered, and an unanimous satisfaction with his ministerial
abilities being expressed, a vote was passed to call him to the Ministry
at a proper time.

"August 10.--Ch. Meeting. This evening
our Brother William Carey was called to the work of the Ministry, and sent
out by the Church to preach the Gospel, wherever God in His providence
might call him.

"April 29, 1787.--Ch. M. After the Orde.
our Brother William Carey was dismissed to the Church of Christ at Moulton
in Northamptonshire with a view to his Ordination there. "

These were the last years at Olney of William
Cowper before he removed to the Throckmortons' house at Weston village,
two miles distant. Carey must often have seen the poet during the twenty
years which he spent in the corner house of the market-square, and in the
walks around. He must have read the poems of 1782, which for the
first time do justice to missionary enterprise. He must have hailed what
Mrs. Browning calls "the deathless singing" which in 1785, in "The Task,"
opened a new era in English literature. He may have been fired with
the desire to imitate Whitefield, in the description of whom, though reluctant
to name him, Cowper really anticipated Carey himself:--

/1/
The shopmate, William Manning, preserved this signboard. In 1881 we found
a Baptist shoemaker, a descendant of Carey's wife, with four assistants,
at work in the shed. Then an old man, who had occasionally worked under
Carey, had just died, and he used to tell how Carey had once flipped him
with his apron when he had allowed the wax to boil over.

/2/
In the library of the late Rev. T. Toller of Kettering was a manuscript
(now in the library of Bristol Baptist College) of nine small octavo pages,
evidently in the exquisitely small and legible handwriting of Carey, on
the Psalter. The short treatise discusses the literary character and authorship
of the Psalms in the style of Michaelis and Bishop Lowth, whose writings
are referred to. The Hebrew words used are written even more beautifully
than the English. If this little work was written before Carey went to
India--and the caligraphy seems to point to that--the author shows a very
early familiarity with the writings of one who was his predecessor as a
Christian Orientalist, Sir William Jones. The closing paragraph has this
sentence:--"A frequent perusal of the book of Psalms is recommended to
all. We should permit few days to pass without reading in Hebrew one of
those sacred poems; the more they are read and studied, the more will they
delight, edify, and instruct."